1. Field of the Invention
The present invention relates to a mobile phone and, in particular, to a voice dialing method and apparatus for a mobile phone that allows a user to conveniently voice dial with a number.
2. Description of the Related Art
With the advance of mobile and computing technologies, mobile phones are becoming very powerful and dominant devices for mobile computing. Lately, the mobile phones have evolved into mobile multifunction terminals with the incorporation of various multimedia functions such as messaging functions including Short Message Service (SMS) and Multimedia Messaging Service (MMS), visual communication, Internet access functions, etc.
A variety of convenient functions have also been adapted to the mobile phones for satisfying the user requirements. Among them the voice recognition-based dialing is one of the useful functions, with which the mobile phone retrieves a phone number within a phonebook using the voice recognition technology.
Voice recognition is the technology by which words or phrases spoken by humans are converted into electrical signals., These electrical signals are transformed into coding patterns to which meaning has been assigned. The voice dialing is achieved by retrieving the phone number corresponding to the meaning of the electrical signal from the phonebook and automatically dialing the retrieved phone number.
Conventional voice dialing functions insuch a manner that the mobile phone retrieves a phone number registered with features of a speech recorded by the user.
Typically, the voice dialing can be implemented with a name dial function and digit dial function.
The name dial function retrieves from the phonebook a phone number matched with a name or nick name and dials the retrieved phone number. Similarly, the digit dial function recognizes the audio input digits and dials the corresponding phone number.
However, the conventional name dial technique requires the user to remember the name or nickname registered to the phonebook in order to place a call. The user may be inconvenienced when the registered name or nickname does not readily come across.
The conventional name dial technique is useful only when the user remembers all digits of a phone number to place a call. Likewise, the conventional digit dial technique takes relatively long time to receive input speech and recognize the digits from the speech and is required to maintain a storage-consuming voice-phone number mapping table.